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AP Photo/J. David Ake, File Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington. W hen then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn was found to have had a discussion with the Russian ambassador that he shouldn’t have had, it fell to former acting Attorney General Sally Yates to inform White House Counsel Donald McGahn of the intercepted communication. Yates was scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee on March 28 when the hearing was abruptly canceled by committee chairman Devin Nunes, Republican of California, with no notice given to ranking Democrat Adam Schiff, also of California. In recent days, Nunes has appeared before reporters as an unvarnished lackey for the Trump administration, which every day becomes more mired in revelations of questionable ties with Russian nationals—including mobsters and oligarchs —even as Congress is supposed to be investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential...

Olivier Douliery/Sipa USA via AP Images Paul Manafort, former senior aid to Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, attends an event on foreign policy in Washington. I f the United States Congress were doing its job, right now nearly all business before the House and Senate would grind to a halt as leaders addressed a rapidly-unfolding crisis: whether the current administration is acting in the interests of the nation whose Constitution its members have sworn to defend. The nomination hearings of a new Supreme Court justice would be forestalled while national law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigated the current administration’s ties to a foreign government that attempted to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of the president who appointed that nominee. An independent select committee would be quickly convened. A congressional leadership with a shred of patriotism would take a break from trying to revoke health care from everyday Americans to take up an...

(Photo: AP/David Goldman) People arrive at the Oceti Sakowin camp on December 2, 2016, to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline. T o commemorate the 250th birthday of Andrew Jackson, President Donald J. Trump, never a subtle man, arranged to travel to Tennessee to lay a wreath on Old Hickory’s grave in Nashville, Tennessee. Applauded by history for having broadened the scope of the electorate and the politically engaged to include the ordinary white men who had heretofore been locked out of the democratic process, Jackson is often seen as the great leveler, a hero in the myth of American meritocracy. He is also the president who signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which led to the Trail of Tears march of Choctaw Indians off their land in the Southeastern states, on foot and often in chains, to Oklahoma. Thousands died along the way. During his presidency, a host of tribes were decimated in similar ways. Even before he was president, Jackson was an eager participant in the “removal”...

AP Photo/Elise Amendola FBI Director James Comey leaves after speaking at a ceremony in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to mark the opening of new offices of the FBI's Boston division. P oor James Comey. Having helped install Donald Trump in the White House, the FBI director should have been celebrating this International Women’s Day lionized for having shown women who’s boss. The president should be rewarding him for having helped prevent women all over the nation from celebrating the historical breakthrough represented by the nation’s first woman president. But instead of enjoying a power seat in the White House, Comey finds himself in the dog house, while workers across the nation stage something of a strike titled A Day Without a Woman . There is little doubt that Comey’s October 28 letter to Congress —less than two weeks before Election Day—had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. In that letter, absent any findings, Comey stated that the FBI was...

(Photo: Jim Loscalzo/picture-alliance/dpa/AP) President Trump delivers his first address to a joint session of Congress on February 28, 2017. O n Tuesday night, President Trump defied critics by proving he could read a teleprompter. In Trump’s hands, any evolution toward mastery of that skill could prove as dangerous as the improvisational oratorical bullying for which he is better known, for Trump’s reading style renders the articulation of evil into a banal-sounding sing-song celebration of resentment, greed, grief, and death. The consensus forming among political observers on Donald J. Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress is that the president seemed “presidential.” Well, sure, if your idea of presidential is an authoritarian maniac who can read a teleprompter. When speaking in his more customary off-the-cuff style, Trump’s “prime rhetorical instrument is percussion,” writes media critic Todd Gitlin . So true. All those short phrases and mini-sentences that follow...